Victorian and Australian soccer library

My ultimate hope is that eventually I'll start a separate website - an online Australian Soccer Library - that will collect and preserve all sorts of published materials to do with Australian soccer. if you have any expertise in this area as to how this might be done, please do not hesitate to contact me.

For South of the Border's collection of South Melbourne Hellas match programs, both home and away, click here.

This page started with links only to Victorian Soccer Federation (and predecessor organisations) yearbooks. Hopefully over time it will grow to include all sorts of things.

There's too much of this stuff gathering dust in cupboards and boxes, so by all means please download and share these as you see fit; and if anyone has something to share, please send me an email, and I'll see what I can do. If it's already in a PDF format, so much the better.

Those items with links have been uploaded; those without links are those I have in my possession, but which have not been scanned or uploaded yet. Please note that I have started the gradual process of converting all of these documents to an OCR (text recognition) format. Any document you download from this blog that has '(OCR)' at the end of its file name should work (to varying degrees) should you wish to search for keywords within the text.

Club histories
At the moment, I'm not looking for things which are still in print or which can be purchased from a club or author with relative ease. I'm mostly interested in documents produced by clubs, which have been made available for free; or where it is appropriate to do so, to reproduce long out of print materials.

Castlemaine/Castlemaine Goldfields (The World Game in Castlemaine, by Robyn Lewis) - (1974-2014)

Soccer News Victoria
Soccer News was the official news publication of the Victorian Amateur Soccer Football Association, as well as its successor the Victorian Soccer Federation (now FFV). These were sourced from a combination of the efforts of Damian Smith and Mark Boric.

Studs Up magazine
Pioneering fanzine of the NSL era, headed by the late Kevin Christopher.Editions of Studs Up 1-35 and 40 (sourced from The Agitator) all have text recognition. Editions 36-39 and 41-45 do not have text recognition - these were sourced from OzFootball/Damian Smith and are 'locked', which means to add OCR I need to know the password. I don't know the password.

Reading the history of Italian Soccer club mergers/de-mergers', I decided to do some wikipediing, and discovered that there currently exists two separate Zebra's, Brunswick and Moreland! Which is considered the more legitimate successor of the historical Brunswick Juventus?

My professional opinion is that each entity - Moreland, Brunswick and Ranges - has so forfeited important parts of either Brunswick Juventus legacy or continuity, that none of them has the right to claim the status of being the legitimate successor.

In that respect, I consider Juventus as we knew it to have died in the mid 1990s. Each descendant of the splits and mergers would contest that assertion - Moreland because they have highest ranked senior team and Juventus business name, Brunswick because they didn't leave the 'heartland', and Ranges because they have thr trophies - but that the mess and confusion exists at all is enough for me to declare the issue irrelevant. Juventus is dead, has been for 20 odd years, and all those which have followed are only imitations.

My two cents on this is that Brunswick Zebra's have more of a claim than Moreland. When Juve dropped out of the NSL it was only the senior team that merged with Bulleen, while the Juve/Zebars juniors continued to operate uninterrupted and have done so to this day. Few years they re-started their senior team. So to me they are the legitimate claimants.

I decided to immerse myself in the first 4 editions of Studs Up from early 1995, and, my goodness, I felt like I was in a time portal, and all my older disdain and anger at the old NSL bubbled to the surface yet again.

'Highlights':- Instead of a highlights program, just showed a full game!- Coaches speaking with accents. Les pronouncing names with the accent- the woeful penalty shoot out for draws!- abolishing pro/rel, so that NSL powerhouses don't get relegated!- LOTS of Heidelberg infighting ($500,000 debt?!!!)- SM Hellas threaten to leave NSL?! Adel City to play in Malaysia?! Preston to return to NSL (snigger)- the constant threat of Basketball (LOL)- constant refrain of clubs needing to be more Australian (this was my mistaken belief), when the question should have been made to others to create an 'Australian' club!- the hate for Andy Paschalides far greater than the hate for David Basheer and David Zdrillic- Flares were given back to fans after they threw them!- numerous fan problems (invading pitch. Has that happened in A League?)- numerous player problems (Markovski's political statement). Interesting that fans allowed to make political statements today (pro refugees)And best of all- death threats from Labozetta to Peter Kogoy (who I think I saw on twitter the other day!

One thins that has improved- player drain has been solved with A League. Except that the older generation returning, and the younger generation staying are not in the same class as back then!

Yes l agree as the author of the Ringwood City publication that some errors did occur unfortunately the project was a six week project back in the day with limited resources for the time but it was nice to see it highlighted and always happy to discuss any errors found cheers Dave

We've had a lot of fun over the years with my freewheeling comments policy, but all good things must come to an end. Therefore I will no longer be approving comments that contain personal abuse of any sort.

Still, if your post doesn't get approved straight away, it's probably because I haven't seen it yet.

As usual, publication of a comment does not mean endorsement of its content.